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Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

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Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

#131

Post by sandworm101 »

nommm-nommm wrote: post #129
sandworm101 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are parts of the brain meant for specific tasks. It isn't a homogeneous mass of neurons. The bit that is working the eyes atm was designed (via evolution) to work the eyes. As was the bit that takes the message from the eyes and ups the heart rate when a lion appears in your field of view. There is certainly some flexibility, but the basic task layout is a layout, not a random allocation.

>The bit that is working the eyes atm was designed (via evolution) to work the eyes. Evolution is a random process, there is no designing, there's no goals.

(1) Evolution is not random. Mutation may be random, but feature selection is based on a rule.

(2) There is a goal: species survival.

(3) The only rule is that whatever aids (2) is a rule for purposes of (1).

Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

#132

Post by evanws »

nommm-nommm wrote: post #129
sandworm101 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are parts of the brain meant for specific tasks. It isn't a homogeneous mass of neurons. The bit that is working the eyes atm was designed (via evolution) to work the eyes. As was the bit that takes the message from the eyes and ups the heart rate when a lion appears in your field of view. There is certainly some flexibility, but the basic task layout is a layout, not a random allocation.

>The bit that is working the eyes atm was designed (via evolution) to work the eyes. Evolution is a random process, there is no designing, there's no goals.

You know exactly what he meant. You are using the word design in a different way than him.

There's absolutely a part of the brain that specializes processing visual information, just as there are organs throughout the rest of your body that specialize with other different tasks.

Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

#133

Post by matchagaucho »

The 90 / 9 / 1 rule is finally taking hold on Facebook.

With only 1% of the users generating content, 9% simply liking/commenting, and 90% logging in to just watch.... FB is desperate to satiate the immediate gratification needs of 1B+ people.

Video is the quick fix.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)

Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

#134

Post by y14 »

hanniabu wrote: post #116

It'd be great if we could extract subtitles from video and put into a nice text format that's easy to read so it's skimmable. Then when you get to an area of interest, you should be able to click the place where you're interested and a video will pop up and start from there. Then when you've heard what you wanted to hear you can minimize the video and skim the text for the next area of interest and so on.

This is a problem we (accessible.ai) have been working on in the past few months. We're still tuning and improving but with a multi-modal approach of signal processing, speech recognition and text analysis we were able to come up with a pretty good MVP to solve this issue. You can take a look at our small demo here: http://accessible.ai/nav

Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

#135

Post by sverige »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #103
sverige wrote: post #102

While video has the ability to communicate certain things more efficiently than text, it is far inferior in other ways. For example, video is great at showing the physical relationship between car parts - what they look like, where they go - so if I'm trying to figure out how to get to that sixth spark plug on a 1990 Bronco II, I'm going to look for a video. Video is also good at pacing the timing of emotional reacti…

>> Words are the fundamental unit of thinking, Woa. Biig assumption. I totally agree that text is "fundamental" indeed to our ability to communicate our mind-state, but text is not our mind state and it's a huge leap from "I can communicate with text" to "I'm thinking in text". You might as well assume video frames are fundamental units of thinking.

"Words," not "text." Illiterate people have words but can't read text. And some people "think in pictures" or "feelings" but that kind of thinking isn't the same as thinking in words.

Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

#136

Post by gnicholas »

sandworm101 wrote: post #76
gumby wrote: post #9

> Human brains process it absurdly well considering there's nothing really built-in for it. That's unclear. The sheer bitrate of reading suggests that it might tap into some deep structures -- hacking some parts of the visual and speech systems, if you prefer. I don't click on HN video links because I find video slow and frustrating way to learn almost anything. Text is so random access -- you can skip over boring bi…

Those deep structure may be active, but reading was never in their design documentation. Our brains evolved to what they are today long before reading was a thing. The fact that we read so well is probably a hacked-together scheme tying together structures meant for pattern recognition and speech. I see reading much like swimming. None of us can swim without practice, as none of us can read. The scary thing is that e…

There's an excellent book [1] that explores the neurological aspects of language. TLDR: language evolved to be efficient for our existing brain structures—our brains did not evolve to be good at language.

1: https://www.amazon.com/Reading-Brain-New-Science-Read/dp/014...

Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

#137

Post by Natanael_L »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #127
thomasfoster96 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In fact I think the trend to teach kids English via "phonics" makes spelling harder; comment back if you want to discuss further. It took me a long time to realise the point of learning 'phonics' at school (they were called phonograms in Australia). While I can see why writing and reading without speaking makes phonics look useless, for children, all of their language is initially communicated through sound. Puttin…

> Of course, English uses 26 letter to represent 44 or so sounds, so as far as learning to read and write via phonics goes, English is one of the worst examples there is. What you really want, for learning to read and write via phonics, is determinism -- you want someone to be able to write something if they know how it sounds, and to be able to read something if they see its written form. There's no need to have sym…

So basically everybody should model their language after Finnish. I can supposedly pronounce almost any Finnish word or sentence near perfectly, and I don't understand a word of the language.

The rules for pronunciation is very directly linked to the spelling, with few exceptions.

Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

#138

Post by gumby »

sandworm101 wrote: post #131
nommm-nommm wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The bit that is working the eyes atm was designed (via evolution) to work the eyes. Evolution is a random process, there is no designing, there's no goals.

(1) Evolution is not random. Mutation may be random, but feature selection is based on a rule. (2) There is a goal: species survival. (3) The only rule is that whatever aids (2) is a rule for purposes of (1).

Species survival? Gene reproduction you mean. The organism is simply a way for the gene to propagate itself.

Check out Dawkins' The Selfish Gene.

Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

#139

Post by [deleted] »

rpgmaker wrote: post #38
gumby wrote: post #9

> Human brains process it absurdly well considering there's nothing really built-in for it. That's unclear. The sheer bitrate of reading suggests that it might tap into some deep structures -- hacking some parts of the visual and speech systems, if you prefer. I don't click on HN video links because I find video slow and frustrating way to learn almost anything. Text is so random access -- you can skip over boring bi…

In my case I think I avoid HN video links because I know in advance that they will ask me to commit an exact amount of time to it without knowing whether it will be worth it in the end. With text on the other hand, I can easily start to read an article and begin to skim it once I see that it isn't as interesting as I thought it'd be.

[deleted]

Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

#140

Post by gumby »

thomasfoster96 wrote: post #117
gumby wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My recent forays into Kanji suggest there's more to visual processing of text than what we permit ourselvesto learn due to phonic constraints associatedwith language acquisition The phonic connection to reading is overrated IMHO and this is why I wrote of a hack of the visual system. Kanji/Hanzi are so easy to read because over the millennia the ones that are hard to recognize at speed have bene dropped or tuned --…

> In fact I think the trend to teach kids English via "phonics" makes spelling harder; comment back if you want to discuss further. It took me a long time to realise the point of learning 'phonics' at school (they were called phonograms in Australia). While I can see why writing and reading without speaking makes phonics look useless, for children, all of their language is initially communicated through sound. Puttin…

Yes, written English isn't a phonetic language like, say, Hindi. Or even German where spelling is changed to keep up with changes in pronunciation.

English is somewhat conservative with spelling, so a lot of words embody their roots in their written form. Teaching kids to spell via phonetics and a huge set of rules makes spelling (and comprehension of new words) harder not easier.

Of course you can take this conservatism to absurd lengths: in French spelling and pronunciation have become so divorced after only a few hundred years that spelling bees are prime time television!

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